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Thursday, November 8, 2018

'A box on the ear' nghĩa là cú bạt tai (trừng phạt, cảnh cáo) (a physical blow struck on or around the ear, usually as a punishment or reprimand for some behavior).

Ví dụ

Martin Luther wrote that he gave his wife a box on the ear whenever she was “saucy.” (láo xược, hỗn xược)

I will give them a box on the ear which will make them…relinquish (từ bỏ) their revolutionary ambitions.

The French horn seems to enter prematurely in the recapitulation (bản tóm tắt lại), an effect that Beethoven’s contemporaries initially thought to be a mistake. Ries recounts that "At the first rehearsal of the Symphony, which was terrible—but at which the horn player made his entry correctly—I stood beside Beethoven and, thinking that a blunder had been made I said: 'Can't the damned hornist count?—it sounds horribly false!' I think I came pretty close to getting a box on the ear. Beethoven did not forgive that little slip (điều lầm lỗi, sự lỡ lời, sơ suất) for a long time."

EVERY MINUTE, A dumptruckful of plastic plops (rơi tõm) into the world's oceans (đại dương). That's eight million metric tons every year. Once waterborne, whatever doesn't wash ashore eventually breaks down into itty bits (nhỏ xíu). The puniest pieces—the ones smaller than 5 millimeters wide—are called microplastics, and their fates are numerous. Some glob onto an Alaska-sized gyre (vòng xoay)d of plastic debris (mảnh vụn) swirling in the Pacific Ocean. Others sink to a variety of depths, according to their densities, perfusing (đổ khắp, làm tràn ngập; truyền dịch (vào cơ thể)) the world's waters. Still others get ingested (ăn vào bụng) by marine life, including fish and shellfish, which are in turn ingested by other animals, like birds and humans.

All of this is a mess, from an ecological (sinh thái) perspective. But it's that last bit—the microplasticine infiltration (sự thâm nhập) of food webs—that worries not just ecologists but gastroenterologists (bác sĩ chuyên khoa dạ dày-ruột). If microplastics are invading the things we eat, it's possible that they're invading our stomachs (dạ dày) and intestines (ruột), too. But while the matryoshka-nature of food chains certainly suggests that human guts harbor microplastics, nobody's really bothered to look in a systematic way...